Documentary Film Selection 2026
These are the first batches of selected documentary films for the 38th European Film Awards (17 January 2026). Further films will be added.
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AFTERNOONS OF SOLITUDE
TARDES DE SOLEDAD
Spain, France
Documentary
AFTERNOONS OF SOLITUDE is a documentary about bullfighting based on the portrait of the bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey and his cuadrilla.
Written & directed by: Albert Serra
Produced by: Albert Serra, Montse Triola, Pedro Palacios, Luís Ferrón, Ricard ... -
AN AMERICAN PASTORAL
UNE PASTORALE AMERICAINE
France
Documentary
Nestled in a valley among Lancaster County’s rolling farmland, Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania has all the charm of small-town America. Yet behind this bucolic veneer lies a fracture in the making.
After months of bitter debate over Covid-19 pandemic res... -
FIUME O MORTE!
Croatia, Slovenia, Italy
Documentary
On 12 September 1919, a troop of some three hundred soldiers under the leadership of the flamboyant war loving Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio swooped into the Northern-Adriatic port town of Fiume, now Rijeka, wanting to annex the city to Italy. Over the co...
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FLOPHOUSE AMERICA
Norway, Netherlands, United States
Documentary
Due to the ongoing housing crisis in the U.S., many people are forced to live in run-down hotels, known as flophouses. Twelve-year-old Mikal shares a small, inexpensive room in one of these hotels with his parents and their cat, Smokey. Their home ...
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LISTEN TO THE VOICES
KOUTÉ VWA
Belgium, France
Documentary
Melrick, a 13-year-old boy, spends his summer vacation in Cayenne with his grandmother Nicole. His desire to learn to play the drum brings back the spectre of Lucas, Nicole's son, also a drummer, who died in tragic conditions 11 years earlier.
Directed b...
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MILITANTROPOS
Ukraine, Austria, France
Documentary
MILITANTROPOS captures the human condition through the fractured realities of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The film pieces together everyday lives transformed by war – those who flee, those who lose everything, and those who stay to resist and fight – tr...
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RIEFENSTAHL
Germany
Documentary
Leni Riefenstahl is considered one of the most controversial women of the 20th century. Her iconographic imagery of TRIUMPH OF THE WILL and OLYMPIA stands for perfectly staged body worship, for the celebration of the superior and victorious. The aesthetics of their images se...
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SONGS OF SLOW BURNING EARTH
PISNI ZEMLI SHSCHO POVOLNO HORYT
Ukraine, France, Denmark, Sweden
Documentary
An audiovisual diary of Ukraine’s immersion into the abyss of the first two years of Russia's full-scale invasion, made up of places, occasional characters, rare dialogues, intraframe sounds and silences which, when ...
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TWST / THINGS WE SAID TODAY
France, Romania
Documentary
TWST takes as its starting point the arrival of the Beatles in New York for their August 1965 concert at Shea Stadium, and as its title a Beatles song that already anticipates a time when the present moment will have become a haunting past, neither retrievable nor fo...